On July 2, 1946, Medgar Evers, a black native of Mississippi and a World
War II combat veteran, along with several other black Gls, headed down to
the courthouse in Evers's hometown of Decatur, Mississippi. Evers hoped
to celebrate his return from service and his twenty-first birthday by voting
in the Democratic primary. When the group arrived at the courthouse,
however, they encountered a mob of fifteen to twenty armed white men
intent on stopping them or any other blacks from exercising their franchise.
"We had all seen a lot of dead people on Omaha beach," Evers recalled. "All
we wanted to be was ordinary citizens. We fought during the war for America, Mississippi included. Now after the Germans and Japanese hadn't
killed us, it looked as though white Mississippians would." Rather than risk
sure death, Evers and the other black veterans retreated. Even in retreat
Evers could see a white man with a gun "keeping a bead on us all the time,"
a reminder of the precariousness of the life of a black person in Mississippi.1

Nearly a decade later, in August 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old
black youth from Chicago, traveled to Money, Mississippi, to visit with his
mother's family. Shortly after he arrived, Till, his cousins, and their friends
ventured to the town drugstore to buy some candy. On his way out of the
store, Till allegedly whistled at and said "bye baby" to the female shopkeeper. Later that night, the shopkeeper's husband, Roy Bryant, and his
half-brother, J. W. Milam, knocked at the door of the home of Mose Wright, Till's great-uncle, where Till was staying. Shining a flashlight into Wright's

Print this page

While we understand printed pages are helpful to our users, this limitation is necessary
to help protect our publishers' copyrighted material and prevent its unlawful distribution.
We are sorry for any inconvenience.